On Saturday 9 January 2010, members and associate members of the European Consortium for Asian Field Study (ECAF) convened for the third annual ECAF General Meeting, which was hosted by the University of Hamburg’s Asien-Afrika-Institut under the patronage of the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.  After the focus on India at the Pondicherry General Meeting in 2009, the emphasis in Hamburg was on Chinese Studies and the development of ECAF’s field presence in China. The meeting, which was chaired by Franciscus Verellen, approved the proposal tabled by the ECAF Steering Committee, which met on 8 January 2010, to maintain the 2009-level of member contributions to the Common Budget for 2010. Proceedings were marked by the announcement of the January 1st launch of IDEAS (Integrating and Developing European Asian Studies), a project financed by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme  (see January 2010 editorial), and Professor Joao Paulo Oliveira e Costa of the Centro de História de Além-Mar (CHAM) was appointed to represent the ECAF Consortium on the IDEAS Steering Committee. Participants approved the accession request of Waseda University, Tokyo, to become an associate member of the ECAF Consortium, which now includes 13 associate members (from non-EU countries) and 32 full members from 10 European Union countries. The Oriental Institute of Prague offered to host the next bi-annual ECAF Steering Committee meeting, which will be held at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in July 2010. It was also decided that the next ECAF General Meeting which is scheduled to take place in January 2011, will be hosted by the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (IsIAO) in Rome.